€173,988

3,740

Our mission is to turn agricultural and digital experiences into the ultimate farming game — a detailed simulator, that is as close to reality as a simulation game can get. Our goal is to have the game scalable, for both casual players and farming enthusiasts, while also using the newest technologies to make the game simply beautiful.

We are confident that Cattle and Crops will be your new favorite farming and management simulation and that you’ll love it as much as we do.

In CnC you’ll get highly detailed and accurate vehicles complete with custom functions like interactive mirrors, doors or a customizable three-point hitch - just to name a few.
We also paid a lot of attention to physics, ground interaction and sounds to make you feel like you’re driving a real tractor.

It is our philosophy that the players should be completely free in their style of play. Whether you want a highly realistic or arcade experience, if you want to drive the vehicles yourself or manage your staff while you watch them do their work: you have the choice!

When using employees, you can delegate common tasks to them - like transporting fruits, feeding animals, harvesting fields and much more. You can also increase their skills and happiness over time to make them more efficient.

If you choose to be a rancher, your animals need to be taken care of: breed them, feed them, clean their stables, prevent diseases and finally sell them.

Our dynamic ground system includes enduring wheel and machinery tracks that influence the terrain depth and allow for highly detailed acre surfaces when cultivating, plowing or simply driving on fields.

Dynamic terrain

Plant growth and health depends on various ground conditions like moisture levels, nutrients and several disease factors. As an example for the simulation detail level, the plant growth (based on the BBCH scale) is simulated every day for each plant.
Take good care of your crops and fields, or they won’t yield the best profit.

With the CnC weather system being based on real statistical climate data, each map’s weather is very accurate for each season. Weather has a direct influence on the ground, so depending on the machinery you use, you might get stuck in muddy fields after long rains if you’re not careful. Long periods of drought or rain will also influence your farming strategies: if there is no rain you have to find a way to water your fields; if there is too much rain you may have difficulties harvesting your crops.

As with most gameplay settings, the influence of weather and diseases can be customized or disabled fully in the gameplay options.

When you are starting out you can chose to play in campaign mode. This will give you several tutorial quests so you can learn all about the detailed farming features mentioned above.

Experience the challenging life of a farmer, working your way up to owning your own farm and machinery. Improve your character by earning XP, specialize your business, and expand it to other maps. As a modder you’ll be able to easily add your own storyline by adding quests to your maps.

In addition, the game’s sandbox mode lets you test and play without any restrictions, XP or character specializations.

What is better than playing a good farming simulation? Enjoying it with your friends!
In version 1.0 of CnC you’ll be able to join your friends’ farm and help them out, or acquire the help of another player for your business.

Every multiplayer game also influences your game profile so that you receive extra XP and money for playing with your friends.

For us, easy modding is a crucial part of any game experience. We'll actively support your modding efforts by providing modding video tutorials and the tools we use during game development, including an ingame map and vehicle editor.

Not everyone likes fully realistic physics, intense weather changes, employees with needs or animals and plants that get sick. In Cattle and Crops it’s up to you: customize many important gameplay settings, or even turn them off completely.

We’re very proud to be supported by our license partners in the industry:

Masterbrain Bytes GmbH & Co. KG is an independent game development company based in Bremen, Germany. Our team has a personal background in agriculture and consists of experienced engine developers and game designers, and professional 3D and environment artists.

Cattle and Crops is our first official game project, but our team members have many years of experience in game development and modding. For example:

This is only a short list of public projects our team members have worked on. Some of them have also worked on commercially released titles in the games industry.

Masterbrain Bytes was founded specifically to develop and advance Cattle and Crops. Its sole purpose is to release and further improve the game: from the first version, then continuous improvements up to future versions.

But in the end, we are gamers. We’re developing this game because we want to play it, and we’re proud of the development achievements so far. Now it’s time to take the next step.

Our aim is to always continue development of Cattle and Crops, not simply increase the version number. New features, based on your feedback, will be added on a regular basis.

Every image or video not labeled as “concept art” is actual in-game content without any kind of polishing or manipulation.

Cattle and Crops will be available for Windows 7/8/10, Linux and later Mac OS X. Currently, we are focusing on desktop PCs.

PS4 support may be available in the future, depending on the success of this campaign. While the licensed engine technology already provides support for it, a port would still require major additional amount of work on the engine code and the user interface.

Our engine is based off the C4 engine by Terathon. We have heavily improved it to match our requirements, such as dynamic terrain, vegetation, weather systems and much more. The engine provides great modding support and is easy to use for both players and modders.

We have invested more than 40,000 hours in the development so far. We have running costs that mostly consist of our employee wages, but that also include software, hardware and licensing. As you can imagine, this doesn’t come cheap. So far, the project has been funded fully through equity financing, which is reaching its limits.

In order to keep full control over the development of Cattle and Crops, our main goal is to remain completely independent of investors and publishers.

A successful Kickstarter campaign will allow us to finish a first version of the game with the currently planned scope and roadmap. Reaching our stretch goals would enable us to increase the team size and produce more game content, such as maps and vehicles.

At the same time, this game is a labor of love for us. We want to make it for you, and with you. By using a crowdfunding platform and opting for an Early Access model, we’ll be able to include you, the players, and listen to your feedback in the development process.

Risks and challenges

Compared to projects that only consist of a basic concept, our failure risk is considerably lower. What you see in our videos or screenshots is always real gameplay material, showing that the project has made good progress so far, but that the journey has only just begun. We have a working game with (almost) all core features that feels more and more like a finished product every day. It would be sad if the project wasn’t finished at all or major features were not included.

Cattle and Crops is a very complex software project, and as such, can oftentimes entail unforeseen bugs and issues. Finding and fixing those can be very time consuming and sometimes even cause a delay in the schedule. We have already calculated some extra time for possible problems like this in our roadmap - but it could mean that we can’t deliver each milestone on the exact promised date.

Without successful funding we would have to find an investor to finish the game in time. This would cause definite delays, and could mean we’d have to change our plans/politics (loss of creative control), or we’d be forced to release an unfinished game because of a random deadline.

But, since we’ve already dealt with the biggest challenges we are confident that we can deliver a stable and enjoyable product. We’ve hit many walls - especially technical difficulties - during development, but we’ve successfully reached all the goals that we’ve set for ourselves so far.

There aren’t any difficult issues left that require a ton of additional research. It’s all a matter of time, labor and money to finish the last milestones.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge €666 or more
About US$ 759

CnC Farming Experience Day

In cooperation with Claas and Köckerling we will host the Cattle and Crops Farming Experience Day in the late summer 2017. You’ll meet the CnC developers and get manufacturing plant tours with both Claas and Köckerling. In addition you’ll drive vehicles that are included in CnC. Take a seat in one of Claas’ most compelling machines, attach a Köckerling tool and get out onto the field (escorted driving)!

The event will include a stay in a hotel (one night) and catering. Additionally includes plant tours and driving experience. Does not include transfer to Gütersloh.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge €3,333 or more
About US$ 3,798

Custom Map and Lifetime DLC - Platin

All digital downloadable DLCs that will be ever made for Cattle and Crops and the community gets a map designed by your map concept or suggestions or geo coordinates of map size 4 km² (~ 990 ac) at any location except urban.
The map will be available after the final 1.0 release.